The federal government has carried through on its promise to appeal a
court ruling that invalidated a policy forbidding women from covering
their faces when being sworn in as citizens.

In a notice filed Monday with the Federal Court of Appeal, lawyers
for the minister of citizenship and immigration said a federal judge
committed several errors in fact and law, including “misapprehending,
misconstruing or failing to consider the evidence before the court.” ...

In a court ruling last month, federal Judge Keith Boswell deemed the
niqab ban to be unlawful because it “interferes with a citizenship
judge’s duty to allow candidates for citizenship the greatest possible
freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation of the
oath.”That prompted Prime Minister Stephen Harper to vow to appeal the ruling
because covering one’s face while being sworn in is “not how we do
things here” and is “offensive.”

The ruling was made in a case filed by Zunera Ishaq, a Pakistani
national and a permanent resident in Canada since October 2008. Ms.
Ishaq argued that removing her niqab (a full face covering worn by some
Muslim women), as required by the CIC regulation, would be an
infringement on her religious beliefs, which are protected by the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. She claimed that as a devout
Sunni Muslim who voluntarily follows the Hanafi school of fiqh,
or jurisprudence, in Islam, her wearing of the niqab is a religious
obligation and that its removal would infringe her religious freedom.

Ms. Ishaq asked the court to declare the CIC policy as inconsistent
with the governing legislation under paragraph 2(a) and section 15(1) of
the Charter. The relevant sections of the Charter refer to “freedom of
conscience and religion” and equality rights.

But Ms. Ishaq’s claim that she is required as a matter of religious
belief to wear the niqab is untrue. Neither Islam, nor Hanafi rites or
jurisprudence as part of Islamic belief, make such a requirement
obligatory for Muslim women. The wearing of the niqab by a small
percentage of Muslim women is a modern custom turned into religious
mandate and enforced by coercion in public by Muslim extremists in
Pakistan and some other Muslim majority countries.

On May 13, 1939, the MS St. Louis of the Hamburg-America Line, set
sail for Havana, Cuba, with 937 Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution
among the passengers. Although they had all purchased legal visas, the
Cuban government reversed its position due to the influence of the
German government and, when the ship arrived in Havana, she was refused
permission to berth. Confusion and panic spread aboard ship as many of
the passengers knew what would likely happen to them should they have to
return to Germany.

Captain Gustav Schroder made for Florida but despite the efforts of
members of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet, the United States chose not
to get involved, citing existing immigration guidelines pertaining to
entry visas. In Canada, petitions were sent to Prime Minister MacKenzie
King but once again, the quiet anti-Semitism of the era meant that the
refugees were turned away.

**

In 1942, the 23-year-old Trudeau was a member of a "secret"
revolutionary organization calling for a "national revolution." "The
nation that will be reborn from the revolution" would be Catholic and
French. Even in 1944, when reports of Nazi atrocities could no longer be
dismissed as propaganda, Trudeau was full of admiration for the writing
of the now infamous French anti-Semite Charles Maurras.

Also:

The future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau came in 1960 and co-wrote a starry-eyed book, Two Innocents in Red China, which rejected reports of famine.

What could be a calculated jab at the Tories- specifically Harper-is just another unsubstantiated low-blow that might appeal to low-information voters but nauseate anyone else who can see what a shameful and stupid ploy this is.